How else to describe former President Noynoy? The Filipino language is stronger and more accurate. The English equivalent would be “stupid.” But it does not capture what the problem is with Aquino’s mental health that I had written about in a column entitled “The Clincher.” We might have avoided such a presidency if we took his own father’s description of him as “walang ka-drive drive.” This was a polite description of his son’s serious incapacity. Upsilonians in Boston had their own stories of what they knew about him in Boston.

The name of the psychiatrist friend of the Aquinos was Dr. Steve Agular who headed the psychiatry department of Wellesley College in Boston. His mother was once head of the Philippine Mental Hospital.

Before the 2010 elections, I had talks with Joker Arroyo and Edgar Espiritu who both confirmed Ninoy’s anxiety about his son. Edgardo Espiritu, once head of the Philippine fund in New York said he was surprised that Dr. Steve Agular was assigned to the board without any business or finance background. He said Cory put him there because he was Noynoy’s doctor. He did not know then that doctor meant he was a psychiatrist.

So President Rodrigo Duterte is right to call him “g***” and its literal meaning. He is more than stupid but there were too many who supported him as presidential candidate, the issue was drowned out.

All this and yet he has the effrontery to criticize Duterte’s anti drug campaign.

Ironically Duterte’s popularity owes much to the Aquino’s gargantuan failure and malfeasance. We should hold all those who supported Aquino for president despite knowing his mental health guilty, among them some Jesuits.

I personally knew Fr. Bulatao. His report was accurate but it was turned down as a “fake” by co-Jesuits. By then he was too old and suffering from amnesia. For those who want to know the background of the Bulatao report, just google for it. It shows what kind of president we had then and why he was pushed into the position by foreign interests who wanted a dolt for a Philippine president.

There are more interesting facts that we should look at when Andres Bautista became Comelec Chairman. When he met columnists and editors of Philippine Star, even then he said he could not give any guarantees that Smartmatic PCOS would deliver honest elections. He asked me if I could inaugurate this new system by cutting the ribbon on its launch.

Comelec was being advised by the Carter (former US President) think tank. Additional features had been made.

The US think tank Carter Center said the May 9 polls “marked a significant improvement over previous Philippine elections.” The National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections, another CIA creation) a poll watchdog added its voice in praising Bautista. He said he could arrange a meeting with Carter for me. At the end of the STAR meeting he was immediately on his cell phone calling President Aquino about the STAR meeting.

Smartmatic and its chairman, Mark Malloch-Brown who saw Aquino before the elections is more interesting than we think. His bio data on the UN website says he was adviser to Cory Aquino when she ran against Ferdinand Marcos in a snap election. He was also adviser to other presidential and political candidates, particularly in Latin America. He was once consultant for the Sawyer Miller group that advised Cory Aquino during the Imelda Marcos trial in New York.

So much for the international aspects and the big money that comes with Smartmatic actively conducting our elections. Happily, Filipinos are not entirely powerless to confront this monster that now threatens our country.

There is a solution. We can change our Constitution asap to restructure our body politic from presidential to parliamentary. Then we will no longer need automation. We will have smaller constituencies and fewer candidates and less campaign money to allow meritorious candidates from our marginalized sectors to run for elections.

The current political structure limits the choice of voters to those who control the system, rich oligarchs and family dynasties. The high cost of campaigning breeds corruption and has shut out the marginalized sectors from being fully represented in proportion to their weight.

Let us return to the manual system or let us not have elections at all.

“Electronic voting is unfit for political elections in a democracy and no technology can change this. There are recent claims that this “barrier” has been overcome with the use of strong cryptographic techniques, homomorphic protocols, etc to achieve elections of provable (not probable!) validity…

In democracy governmental power is transferred by counting secret votes during elections. To accept such transfer people and parties must be 100% sure that electoral results are fair and square: doubts about the legitimacy of the winner can damage the political life of the country and even bring riots and revolutions.

The only way to guarantee fairness of elections is that electoral procedures guarantee that each vote really represents its (unknown) elector’s will.

We know we can’t blindly trust any organization when dealing with elections, thus we, the people, need to verify all by ourselves that those electoral procedures really work as they should! Fairness of elections can be guaranteed only by electoral procedure open to the active check of the people by democratic control.

Ballot paper elections can be subjected to proper democratic control because humans can check the handling of ballot papers, which are visible and tangible objects. It’s not by chance that all democracies have always used ballot papers! With them a few votes may get lost, but no foreign country, terrorist group, economic or political power will ever be able to alter the final result of our elections.

That’s why ballot paper elections are suitable for democracy. The people can tally up real votes (ballot papers democratic control are hand written by electors and readable by anyone). When ballot papers are publicly counted in the same place as they were voted and when scrutinizers are randomly selected citizens (as done in Italy, for example), then who actually counts votes and declares the result of each ballot station is the public, and the central electoral service has the mere role of tallying such results.

Electronic vote, carried out via computer and digital links represents a poisoned chalice for technologically advanced countries; it is no exaggeration to say that it threatens to eliminate democracy as we know it today.